Cubit, who has coached WMU for eight years, was released from the final year of his contract and could receive a
maximum buyout payment of $145,000.

That amount is peanuts compared to some of the situations detailed in the Times story -- University of Tennessee could be on the hook for up to $9 million for severance of its football coach and his assistants.

What is more pertinent to WMU fans is the Times' reference to a recent study that "suggests that replacements do not tend to make
underperforming teams much better in subsequent seasons and frequently
make them worse."

An excerpt from the Times story:

A study published last month
in Social Science Quarterly may provide sobering news to Auburn,
Tennessee and other universities that have fired their coaches. Using
data from 1997 to 2010, the study compared the performance of major
college teams that replaced their coach with teams with similar records
that kept their coach.

The results, tracked over a five-year period following the coaching
changes, might surprise many. The lowliest teams subsequently performed
about the same as other struggling teams that did not replace their
coach. Mediocre teams — those that won about half their games in the
year before a coaching change — performed worse than similar teams that
did not replace their coach.

The reasons for this are not clearly understood, but may stem from an
adjustment period required by a coach at a new university, the time
players need to learn a new system and disruptions made to recruiting
networks, said E. Scott Adler, an associate professor of political
science at the University of Colorado and the lead author of the study.